Not ultrarational, but there were people suffering in the darkness and crying out for help, a lot of people saying "Later",
To bring this to contemporary examples, do you support Operation Iraqi Freedom?
If I recall my past opinions correctly, I said at the time that while such wars were the only way to free certain countries, I did not trust the competence of the current administration to prosecute it and was strongly against the way in which it was carried out in defiance of international law.
I would say in retrospect that the resulting disaster would have been 2/3 of the way to my reasonable upper bound for disastrousness, but the full degree to which e.g. the Bush Defense department was ignoring the Bush State department was surprising and would not be...
People want to tell everything instead of telling the best 15 words. They want to learn everything instead of the best 15 words. In this thread, instead post the best 15-words from a book you've read recently (or anything else). It has to stand on its own. It's not a summary, the whole value needs to be contained in those words.
I'll start in the comments below.
(Voted by the Schelling study group as the best exercise of the meeting.)